‘Oh yes, there is everything that is good in her eyes,’ said Lady Tremayne, who was young and enthusiastic, a sentiment in which most of the others agreed. At a later period, however, Mrs. Bircham, of The Leas, shook her head a little and said, ‘Now that one thinks of it, there is something curious in Mrs. Blencarrow’s eyes.’ ‘They are very fine eyes, if that is what you mean.’ ‘No; that is not what I mean. She looks you too full in the face with them, as if she were defying you to find out anything wrong about her. Now, when there is nothing wrong to find out, a woman has no occasion to defy you.’ ‘It must be a strange kind of wrong that has not been found out in eighteen years.’ ‘Well, it might have happened before she was married--before she came here at all; and when you know that there is something, however long the time may be, you never can forget it, don’t you know,’ said Mrs. Bircham, shaking her head. ‘You seem to speak from experience, my dear,’ said her husband. ‘No; I don’t speak from experience,’ cried the lady, growing red; ‘but I have seen a great many things in my time. I have seen so many fine reputations collapse, and so many people pulled down from their pedestals.’ ‘And helped to do it, perhaps,’ said Lady Tremayne. But she made the observation in an aside, for no one liked to encounter Mrs. Bircham’s enmity and power of speech. She was one of those people who can develop a great matter from a small one, and smell out a piece of gossip at any distance; and a seed of this description sown in her mind never died. She was not, as it happened, particularly happy in her surroundings. Though she was irreproachable herself, there was no lack of histories in the Bircham family, and Kitty, her second daughter, was one of the little flirts whose proceedings Mrs. Blencarrow so much disapproved. Mrs. Bircham was often herself very angry with Kitty, but by a common maternal instinct could not endure to hear from another any echo of the same reproof which she administered freely.